Educate series: How resilient are you?

You’re late.

It’s raining and you just broke the zip on your favourite coat. Not only do you need to get to your meeting in the next 30 minutes, you also need to arrive calm and ready to present a new concept to your boss and some difficult co-workers.

Or perhaps you’re late, tired from being up all night with the children and needing to run to the shops to buy some milk before heading off to meet a friend. Whatever the situation, I’m sure you can identify with those days where everything seems to be going wrong and it’s up to you to fix it all. In these situations, how resilient are you?

I’m not talking about resilience as a super power which will enable you to glide effortlessly through life, never feeling or experiencing difficult emotions. The examples I opened with can be quite trivial but what if you have been trying to cope with an intensely pressurised environment at work over a period of time which shows no signs of easing? How do you keep on going? Maybe the problem isn’t at work but is in your personal life, such as battling an illness or coping with a tricky family relationship.

It can be difficult to know how to act for the best in these situations but recently I found it useful to complete the online resilience questionnaire from Robertson Cooper which identifies strategies you have in place that will support your resilience and then thoughts or actions that you may engage with that will hinder it. The resilience questionnaire refers to the workplace in the main, but I think it’s useful to try it out regardless of whether you are in paid employment or not. I certainly learnt a few things that gave me food for thought. For example, my organisation skills help me to cope with pressure at work and new changes, but at the same time may make me slightly inflexible when it comes to said new changes as I like to be prepared for events ahead of time and know details.

If you have a spare 20 minutes, why not give the questionnaire a try for yourself? Don’t forget to let me know how you get on and if you find the exercise useful.

Photo by Artem Bali on Unsplash

This is not a sponsored post. Just a useful resource that I wanted to share with you all!